their greatcoats. Carrying big canvas sacks in each hand. They didn’t say a word to us, just started grabbing all L-Love’s kit and golf clubs and spare rabbits’ feet and stuffing them into the sacks. Ripping down the pin-ups off the lockers.
‘Hey!’ shouted Matt. ‘What the hell you doing?’
One of the police turned to him, his face blank as a Gestapo thug’s just before he pulls the trigger. ‘They got the chop,’ he said. ‘Tried to land at Tuddenham and overshot the runway.’ He turned away and began throwing stuff into his bags with renewed vigour. None of them looked at us again. We sat up in bed in our striped pyjamas, hating them. Until they tried to take the prop-blade off the wall. Then Matt was out of bed in a flash.
‘Leave that alone. That’s ours.’
The policeman reached for the blade.
‘It’s ours, I tell you!’ screeched Matt. ‘They gave it to us.’
‘Yeah,’ we all yelled. ‘They gave it to us.’
The policeman shrugged. He knew we were lying. But Matt’s a big lad and he was mad as hell. They finished stuffing stuff into bags and left, jamming off the lights.
‘Bastards,’ said Matt, getting back into bed.
‘They’re only doing their job,’ said Kit, the navigator. ‘I don’t expect they like doing it, over and over again.’
‘Some guys enjoy being undertakers . . .’
Nobody said anything for some time. Then, in the dark, Kit said, ‘They were a good bunch. I’m glad they all went together.’ Which was a pretty bloody stupid thing to say, but what isn’t bloody stupid on that kind of occasion?
Billy the Kid went out to the bogs and was very sick. We listened. In a way he was being sick for all of us; saved us getting out of bed.
We kept the prop-blade a week, then threw it away. It sort of filled the whole hut, like the evil eye of the little yellow god. We never tried interfering with those policemen again, except once.
Next morning, they ran us down to the dispersals to see our new crate, C-Charlie. She really was brand-new, which was funny. They normally give green crews the clapped-out old crates. Why waste a good bomber on a mob who are five times more likely to get shot down than anybody else?
It was bloody freezing, even wearing two sets of long johns and a greatcoat. We mooched around her, kicking things and grumbling; feeling totally unreal and farting and belching all over the crate and giggling every time. Does that shock you? It was partly, I suppose, to show how we felt about everything, and partly to try and get something hard and solid out of our guts which would never go away again. You probably know, that’s the way fear feels. And Billy the Kid kept bleating plaintively about who the other pilot would be.
‘Me,’ said Matt. ‘There is no other pilot. They’re trying to save pilots.’
‘If they blew this bloody crate up now, they could save a navigator as well. And a wireless op and two air-gunners and a lot of petrol.’ Kit was the real joker, even then. Life and soul of the party. Only, his big blue eyes were stary that morning, the whites showing all round like they seldom have since.
We dropped back on to the tarmac.
‘I always wanted to be a landgirl,’ said Matt. Since he was six foot two and the only one of us who had to shave every day, it was quite funny.
We stood and talked and froze. We found out that a year ago, we’d all been in the sixth form. We found out that Matt had been the top pilot of his course, and Kit top navigator. Mad Paul, the front-gunner, and Billy the Kid were top stuff, too; reaction times like greased lightning. (They played a stupid game involving slapping each other’s hands; anyone else who joined in always lost, and it really hurt.) Only I was mediocre. I had passed-out halfway down the wireless ops list.
Still we stood. Were we all there was? Was Matt’s horrible idea coming true? Did we have to take this thing to Germany on our own?
Just then a thirty-hundredweight drove up. A pair of long, thin legs emerged from the cab, stooped shoulders and a cap pushed back to display a wrinkled forehead and balding nut. He didn’t look at us; he walked across to C-Charlie with the precarious dignity of a heron hunting frogs. We gaped at the apparition. His uniform, which carried